Death Penalty Press Release

10.03.16

ACLU Statement on Ohio Executions Set to Resume in January

CLEVELAND—Today the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced that executions will resume in January 2017. Below is a statement that can be attributed to Mike Brickner, Senior Policy Director of the ACLU of Ohio.

“It is disheartening to learn Ohio intends to resume executions after over a decade of problems, including four botched executions. Attempts to use new drug combinations or those that have failed in past lethal injections amount to little more than human experimentation. Even worse, because of a secrecy law enacted by our legislature, Ohioans cannot have confidence that execution drugs were obtained through legal or ethical means, nor that they have been tested for efficacy or regulated in any way. These questions will certainly be addressed by courts, but the state’s insistence to continue with executions runs counter to public support of the death penalty, which is at its lowest point in forty years. Given all of Ohio’s problems with the death penalty and the tremendous risk we run of another botched execution, it is well past time for officials to scrap this broken system altogether.”